Six days ago Garmin told Fenix 9 owners that software 6.73 was at zero percent rollout and that anyone who wanted it had to check manually. This week the same forum post reads differently: 6.73 is now 100 percent live.
That means the update is landing on watches automatically, whether owners went looking for it or not. And the bug threads that followed it are not about shutdowns.
What Garmin said it fixed
The changelog has not changed since we covered the release on October 23:
- Fixed alarm setting vibration forced to Off
- Fixed potential drops and audio stuttering while using Spotify
- Fixed potential shutdown when switching Spotify playlists
- Fixed potential shutdown when using HIIT activity
- Fixed potential shutdown when viewing maps
Four shutdown paths patched. One alarm item. Nothing in there about heart rate variability, battery reporting, or interface speed. Which is exactly where the complaints have landed.
HRV status disappeared
The clearest regression report is from a Fenix 9 Pro inReach 47mm AMOLED owner who has worn the watch since launch. After 6.73, the watch still records an HRV value but no longer produces a status, and both the watch and Garmin Connect are asking for three more weeks of wear to build a baseline that should already exist.
"Since updating to 6.73, I just get the HRV value, but no status anymore," the owner wrote. "The values are there, but it is just not calculating the status."
Not everyone sees it. One reply in the same thread says their watch works fine, and another says the overnight number jumped from 50 to 70, which is a different problem with the same missing baseline. An HRV status that resets itself is not a cosmetic bug. Training readiness, recovery guidance and the whole morning report feed off that baseline, and losing it means weeks of the watch not knowing what your normal looks like.
Spotify is worse, not better
Two of the five 6.73 fixes were supposed to improve Spotify playback. For at least one Fenix 9 Pro 47mm AMOLED owner, the update made it unusable.
Before 6.73, music would crackle or cut out after a few minutes of playback or a skipped track. After 6.73, pressing play on any playlist throws a black screen reading "Start Music on Phone" while headphones are connected, and every button except Back stops responding. Updating the Spotify app, reinstalling it and restarting the watch all failed to clear it.
The same owner lists what did not get fixed either: a heavy delay on the start and back buttons during activities, a sluggish interface, and several seconds of lag before an activity starts.
The alarm fix that did not fix alarms
The one non-shutdown item in the changelog was "Fixed alarm setting vibration forced to Off." In the same thread, a second owner reports the opposite result:
- Hourly chime and spoken hour no longer sound
- Alarms do not vibrate even when vibration is set, with heart rate off, always-on display off and the phone connected
"It's a minor update, but it shouldn't have broken something as simple as a vibration alarm setting," they wrote.
A third reply describes battery life dropping from a couple of days to a single day, the watch restarting during runs, and training readiness failing to display since the update.
None of those are confirmed across the user base. They are individual reports, and Fenix 9 threads are always a mix of genuine firmware regressions and watches with a messy install. But they are consistent enough to be worth knowing before you accept the automatic update.
Other threads worth watching
Three more open threads in the same subforum have appeared around this build:
- Alarms after 6.73, asking whether anyone else is seeing vibration problems on alarms
- Focus mode creation on 6.73, where setting app notifications on or off freezes the watch for a few seconds, ignores the buttons and drops the Garmin Connect connection
- Battery percentage drop and recalibration after a restart, where the reported charge does not match what the watch actually holds
There is also a longer-running pool swim crash that predates this build. Owners report the watch locking up when they hit save after a pool swim, losing the activity entirely. That thread started nine days ago, so it is not a 6.73 regression, but it is still open: a Garmin staff account replied two days ago asking for details by email. One owner recovered the missing files by connecting the watch over USB and pulling the FIT file off the storage directly, which is a workaround worth remembering if it happens to you.
What to do if 6.73 already landed
Not much, and that is the honest answer.
- Restart the watch and give HRV a week. Some owners see status return once a few nights of data accumulate. If it does not, a manual check for software updates is worth one try, since Garmin has shipped small follow-up packages after previous releases
- Re-pair Bluetooth headphones if Spotify playback fails, and test with a downloaded playlist rather than streaming
- Report it to Garmin Support with your firmware version. The swim thread shows staff do respond when enough owners report the same thing, and a forum post alone rarely moves a fix
- Turn off automatic updates if you have a race or a trip in the next two weeks. The setting is under Watch Settings, System, Software Update
If the battery drain in that last thread is real, a spare charging cable buys you a day rather than a fix, and if you are shopping for the watch itself you can check Fenix 9 pricing to see what the current discount looks like.
If you are still on 6.49 and your watch is behaving, there is no rush. The shutdown fixes in 6.73 are real and worth having eventually, but this is the second stable build in a row where the fix list and the bug reports do not match. We said the same thing about the map lag problems in September, and they are still showing up.
Bottom Line
Garmin shipped 6.73 to fix shutdowns and it appears to have done that. It has also arrived with a fresh set of complaints that the changelog never mentions, on a watch that started at $999.99 and is still being cleaned up two months in.
The pattern is familiar by now: a stable build, a narrow changelog, and a forum full of owners finding the rest. Watch the HRV thread before you trust your training readiness numbers, and keep a cable and a way to read the watch's storage handy if you swim in a pool.
Sources: Garmin Forums Fenix 9 series threads (official 6.73 rollout post, HRV status, Spotify and pool swim crash threads), Garmin Rumors release listing for 6.73.
